Parole Board wants to forecast who will kill again

Quadruple homicide in Northampton has state parole board trying to predict which inmates might kill again.

July 03, 2010|By Matt Assad, OF THE MORNING CALL

A year rarely goes by when the Pennsylvania parole board doesn't come under fire because someone it let out early has killed again.

In 2008, inmates released long before their maximum sentences expired killed two police officers in Philadelphia, last year one killed a Pittsburgh police officer, and eight days ago a murderer who was twice paroled allegedly slaughtered four people in Northampton.

University of Pennsylvania professor Richard Berk believes his computers can succeed where members of the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole have sometimes failed.

"This system can forecast which inmates will kill again," Berk said. "With the help of years of computer data, I can separate the really bad guys being released from the people who probably won't re-offend."

It's already being used by probation departments in Philadelphia and Baltimore to enable authorities to more closely supervise potential killers. Pennsylvania's embattled parole board plans to be the first to use it to help it decide whether an inmate should be released.

If Berk's ground-breaking computer models work, it could be key for a state parole board that has come under increasing scrutiny for releasing violent criminals well before they reach their maximum sentence, only to see them go on to commit more violent crimes.

Most recently, 36-year-old Michael Ballard is charged with stabbing to death his former girlfriend, Denise Merhi, 39; her father, Dennis Marsh, 62; her grandfather Alvin Marsh Jr., 87; and neighbor Steven Zernhelt, 53, who heard screams from their Northampton home and tried to help.

Ballard allegedly did it while living at an Allentown halfway house, where he was placed after his second parole. In 1991, Ballard stabbed an Allentown man 13 times, and was first paroled in 2006 after serving the minimum 15 years of his 15-to-30-year sentence.

Killers who kill again after they are released highlight the need for the state to find a more accurate way to predict which inmates present the highest risk when paroled.

So the parole board has given Berk a $228,000 grant to build his system, pilot it next year and have it in place by 2011.

"We're hoping this will take the board's decision-making to a higher level," parole board spokesman Leo Dunn said. "If a computer program can help prevent the death of someone like [Denise Merhi], then the board wants that information."

To build his system Berk, a professor of criminology and statistics at Penn, next month will begin gathering tens of thousands of files of inmates who have gone through the state's prisons. He'll crossfile that information with how they acted after their release, and then develop a detailed profile of the type of inmates who committed violent crimes after they were paroled.

Berk said in Philadelphia, for example, decades of data tell him roughly 1.7 percent of paroled inmates have gone on to kill, or be killed, within two years. His system, which Philadelphia has been using since last year, is designed to identify about 80 percent of that 1.7 percent.

While the profile of the likely repeat killer is unique to each prison system, Berk said some traits are part of almost every "bad guy" profile. Most are males younger than 30 who have a long history of violent crime with guns. Most committed their first violent crime by the age of 13. And after parole, most are released into an area with a high crime rate.

By using Berk's system to immediately identify risky parolees upon release, Philadelphia probation officials have been able to put those parolees under the strictest supervision, and enroll them in the most intensive programs to help keep them clean.

On the other side of the spectrum, it's helped Philadelphia avoid wasting money on parolees who, according to the data forecast, are least likely to re-offend.

After Philadelphia logged more than 400 murders in 2006, many of them by repeat offenders, Robert Malvestuto, the city's chief of adult probation and parole, decided a complete system overhaul was needed and he based the change on Berk's computer model. Berk and his team at Penn mined city parole records back to 1969. Using the results, Philadelphia reassigned its entire staff of 240 parole officers. Before the overhaul, parole officers had uniform average caseloads of more than 200 each. Now those assigned to the lowest risk parolees have caseloads of as many as 400, while those with high-risk violent offenders have caseloads of fewer than 50.

The overhaul for the most high-risk parolees didn't take effect until August, so it's too early to determine whether it's working, but Malvestuto has put his entire department — and the public's safety — in the hands of the Penn model.

"I've put a lot of faith in this model because I'm convinced it works," Malvestuto said. "I believe this is the future of community corrections."